Four others joined Peter Lougheed in the pantheon of best premiers: William Davis, Allan Blakeney, Frank McKenna and Robert Bourassa (only Danny Williams of more contemporary premiers was in the running with the top 5). These five leaders are not of one piece and exhibit the diverse leadership traits we expect in a federal system: think of the charisma of Lougheed, the geniality of Davis, the intellectual gifts of Blakeney, the entrepreneurial drive of McKenna and the patience of Bourassa.<\/p>\n
Four of the five started their premierships at roughly the same time (Bourassa in 1970, Davis, Lougheed and Blakeney all in 1971) and thus faced the same broad challenges over the course of their partnerships. Blakeney in his memoirs recalls his first federal-provincial conference in the fall of 1971, which began with a dinner at 24 Sussex. At that dinner, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Premier Bourassa got into a heated discussion over the Constitution (the Victoria Charter had been rejected by Quebec in July 1971) while the other premiers, shocked, looked on. Then at a later federal-provincial meeting, Blakeney witnessed a similar vituperative exchange between Trudeau and Premier Ren\u00e9 L\u00e9vesque, initially in French. Blakeney recalls: \u201cThen they looked around the table and noticed the French was too fast for the rest of us, we were not getting the full benefit of their remarks, so they switched to English and continued the pleasantries. By this time, we had become a little more familiar with the Quebec style of political address.\u201d<\/p>\n
Blakeney’s ironic recollection of Quebec \u201cpleasantries\u201d makes the point that each of the top 5 premiers was challenged by the seminal political reality of their generation \u2014 the rise of Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois nationalism \u2014 and how best to deal with it within the framework of Canadian federalism. Frank McKenna, winning office in 1987, missed the Trudeau initiative of repatriating the Constitution \u2014 which so consumed the energies of Lougheed, Davis, Blakeney and Bourassa \u2014 but he was equally preoccupied with how best to reconcile Quebec to the constitutional settlement of 1982. McKenna was a key participant in the Meech Lake and Charlottetown debates of 1987-92, along with Robert Bourassa, the great survivor, who was still active when all of his fellow premiers from 1971 (when he first met Blakeney) had by then retired.<\/p>\n
These five leaders are not of one piece and exhibit the diverse leadership traits we expect in a federal system: think of the charisma of Lougheed, the geniality of Davis, the intellectual gifts of Blakeney, the entrepreneurial drive of McKenna, and
\nthe patience of Bourassa.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nBut if Quebec and the Constitution was the defining federal-provincial issue for all five of our \u201cbest premiers\u201d right behind was the phenomena of the New West and the rebalancing of Confederation through the impact of energy. In 1973, OPEC tripled the price of oil from US$3 a barrel to $9 a barrel \u2014 oil revenues leapt from $500 million to $1.5 billion. In 1979, the price of oil tripled again. Economic power surged west. Peter Lougheed articulated the values of the New West well before the jump in the price of oil, but joined by Blakeney, Lougheed led the fight to ensure that the western provinces retained the right to manage their own resources and reap the benefits. Bill\u00a0Davis, for his part, had to cope with how higher energy prices were transforming the economy of Canada, and with it the traditional heartland of Ontario. The enduring challenge of how to create a workable framework to accommodate Quebec within a wider union while dealing with the rise of the New West were the two overarching national challenges faced by each of our top 5.<\/p>\n
Each of these leaders responded to the challenges differently, and their skills and approaches make a leadership whole greater than the sum of their parts. Each of the top 5 is examined in more detail below (and in separate articles in this magazine) but first let us examine the criteria by which they were judged.<\/p>\n
Richard E. Neustadt, adviser to every Democratic president from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton and author of\u00a0Presidential Power<\/em>, the most influential book on the theory and practice of presidential leadership (\u201cPresidential power is the power to persuade\u201d), assessed presidents on four criteria. Evaluating an American president and a Canadian premier is not an exactly comparable process \u2014 Neustadt emphasizes foreign policy and the president’s stance under pressure in our nuclear age.<\/p>\n
But three elements of the Neustadt criteria were adopted and adapted by\u00a0Policy Options<\/em>\u00a0to fit the Canadian context. The first was political winability and the ability to persuade. There is a role for prophets and John F. Kennedy, in\u00a0Profiles in Courage<\/em>, wrote about leaders who were willing to lose over principle. But Neustadt rightly emphasizes that great leaders win elections, keep winning them and leave a record that allows their party to at least survive if not thrive (the truly great masters like\u00a0Sir John A. Macdonald or Franklin Roosevelt realign the electorate).<\/p>\n
What were the leaders’ purposes, asks Neustadt, \u201cand did they run with or against the grain of history\u201d? Canada’s premiers deal with the problems that most affect the daily lives of our citizens \u2014 health, education, infrastructure, clean water and social assistance. Premiers were therefore evaluated on their vision for their province, fiscal management and social infrastructure like hospital and higher education. A premier’s contribution to the national debate, both defending his province’s interest while thinking of Canada as a whole, is also a critical part of a premier’s \u201cpurposes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lastly, Neustadt discusses the \u201cfeel\u201d of a leader \u2014 his understanding of the nature of the power in the reality of his time and how this understanding of himself and others contributes to his legacy or the impact left on his province and country, its character and public standing. Superior leadership of any type is to be admired. But not all legacies are the same.<\/p>\n
Three of our best premiers chosen by the jury \u2014 Davis, Blakeney and Bourassa \u2014 were \u201ctransactional,\u201d to use the description by James MacGregor Burns in his book Leadership. Such leaders are skilled at understanding their electorates and making the exchanges and compromises necessary to keep the political system working and their parties in power. More rarely, there are also \u201ctransformational\u201d leaders, who change the value system of their followers and by so doing change definitions of the public interest. Frank McKenna was transformational in New Brunswick; Peter Lougheed was transformational in Alberta and in Canada as a whole.<\/p>\n
So dominant has been the Conservative Party provincially in Alberta since the Lougheed era that it is difficult to recall how miniscule Lougheed’s political base was when he became leader of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party in 1965.<\/p>\n
Each of the other premiers selected by the\u00a0Policy Options<\/em>\u00a0panel inherited either a ruling dynasty or a party that had recently governed. Not Peter Lougheed \u2014 he started virtually from scratch. The Conservatives had never formed a government in Alberta and had no seats in the legislature; surveys gave them support in the low teens.<\/p>\n
But Lougheed saw that Alberta was changing: the rurally dominated \u201cback to the bible\u201d era of Ernest Manning (when we lived in Edmonton, our family used to listen to Manning, who still had a religious radio show even as premier) was giving way to the urban concerns of Calgary and Edmonton. In the 1967 election, Lougheed won six seats (five of them in Edmonton and Calgary) and 26 percent of the popular vote. Ernest Manning was still a dominant figure but Lougheed had established the Progressive Conservatives as the party of the new emerging urban middle class. With Manning retired, in the 1971 election under the slogan \u201cNOW,\u201d Lougheed won 49 seats to the Social Credit Party’s 25 seats. In the 1975, 1979 and 1982 elections, he led the Progressive Conservative Party to landslide victories. In 1982, for example, he won 75 seats out of 79. This record is simply one of the most impressive in Canadian party history.<\/p>\n
Lougheed himself personified the new Alberta he so strongly represented. His grandfather was a federal cabinet minister, but like most westerners, his family fortune declined during the Depression. Education was the way to move up and Lougheed enrolled at the University of Alberta, where he combined his academic pursuits with playing football for the Edmonton Eskimos and becoming president of the student union. In 1954, he went to Harvard to earn an MBA and returned to Calgary to practise law and work in business.<\/p>\n
Upon becoming premier in 1971, Lougheed began by re-organizing government from the unstructured, informal style of the Socreds into a rational model based on current business practices. A cabinet committee system was created, the executive council machinery became the organizing centre and over time the Alberta public service was nearly doubled. An Alberta version of the \u201cQuiet Revolution\u201d ensued.<\/p>\n
The hodgepodge of past royalty regimes were replaced by a uniform 12.5 percent, which greatly increased revenues. These enhanced revenues in turn were spent on investments in education, health and medical research. Lougheed’s goal was to use resource revenue to create an enduring provincial economy based on learning and technology. In 1976, he created the Heritage Fund (now worth $15 billion) to put aside current reserves for future use. Also, as part of his pan-Canadian approach, Lougheed encouraged the other provinces to borrow from the fund for their capital needs.<\/p>\n
Lougheed’s vision was that a stronger West would make for a better Canada. The West \u201cwill be a strong part of Canada a decade from now\u201d (quoted in David Kilgour’s 1988 book\u00a0Uneasy Patriots<\/em>). \u201cI think the West will have more confidence and hopefully more input into decision-making nationally…Canada will be a stronger nation, because we’ll be a stronger West.\u201d So it has proved.<\/p>\n
Lougheed’s determination to have the new West play a large national role was one of the pivots on which the great constitutional debate turned. Lougheed and Allan Blakeney had fought the federal government’s attempt to balance its own budget through imposing an export tax on oil in the 1970s and by a petroleum and gas revenue tax in 1980, known to this day in the West as the National Energy Program (NEP).<\/p>\n
Lougheed and Blakeney made the case that Ottawa was not taxing Quebec’s exports of hydro, so why was it taxing resources in the West? (The Mulroney government, elected in 1984, repealed the NEP and since that time the federal government has not sought a share of oil and gas royalties.)<\/p>\n
The energy battle led Lougheed to be a leader of the \u201cGang of Eight\u201d premiers in opposition to Trudeau’s repatriation package. Lougheed especially disliked the regional \u201cVictoria\u201d amendment proposal, which gave vetoes to Quebec, Ontario and the regions of the West and Atlantic Canada. Instead, Alberta led the charge for a formula based more on provincial equality: most amendments would require the agreement of the federal government and seven of the provinces representing half the population \u2014 the 7\/50 rule. It was Lougheed’s formula and the eventual constitutional deal was a swap \u2014 the provinces accepted the Charter of Rights and the federal government accepted Alberta’s amendment formula.<\/p>\n
Peter Lougheed’s legacy is not only the head offices crowding into Calgary; it is also the enshrining of the provisions by which future generations of Canadians will decide their constitutional fate.<\/p>\n
Allan Blakeney writes that \u201cPremier Lougheed and Premier Davis of Ontario were both gentlemen, and able gentlemen. In my view, neither province has seen their equal to this date.\u201d The experts consulted by Policy Options agree with Blakeney, as Bill Davis was a strong second to Lougheed as the best premier.<\/p>\n
Davis’s electoral achievements are not as stunning as Lougheed’s \u2014 Davis’s majority in 1971 was followed by minority governments in the elections of 1975 and 1977, with a majority again in 1981, but four victories in four tries is still very impressive. Davis had inherited in 1971 a Tory dynasty that stretched back to George Drew in 1943, but Davis made that legacy his own, creating the fabled \u201cBig Blue Machine.\u201d Rosemary Speirs, of the\u00a0Toronto Star<\/em>, a newspaper not usually seen as a cheerleader for Conservatives, writes about the affable Davis, \u201cHis Tories proved adaptable, imposing restraint where once they had been expansive, while selling the voters the idea there was still no better place to go than Ontar-i-o. Davis’s image as a reassuring father figure for difficult times grew on the electorate.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the bread and butter issues, all the premiers highlighted in the survey have had to cope with the impact of the baby boomers, the \u201cbig generation.\u201d Like a tidal wave, they engulf any of the public institutions they meet on their passage. None coped better than Bill Davis. As education minister in 1965, he created Ontario’s system of community colleges, and during his time as premier (1971-85) he funded and expanded this creation.<\/p>\n
With Manning retired, in the 1971 election under the slogan \u201cNOW,\u201d Lougheed won 49 seats to the Social Credit Party\u2019s 25 seats. In the 1975, 1979 and 1982 elections, he led the Progressive Conservative Party to landslide victories. In 1982, for example, he won 75 seats out of 79. This record is simply one of the most impressive in Canadian party history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In 1984, in his last significant initiative as premier, he reversed a longheld position and announced that his government would extend funding to all grades of the Catholic separate school system. He told Eddie Goodman, a close adviser who feared alienating the Conservative Party’s Protestant base that \u201cwe cannot have a bifurcated system of financial aid any longer in Ontario…The fact is that almost half our students are in danger of receiving an inferior education and I don’t accept that.\u201d Davis was the education premier par excellence! \u201cShow me a good doctor, a good lawyer,\u201d he told the Toronto City Alliance in 2003, \u201cand I’ll show you a good kindergarten teacher, a good high school teacher and a good university professor. There is no more important commitment that a government can make than to educate. There really isn’t.\u201d<\/p>\n
Allan Blakeney, premier of Saskatchewan from 1971 to 1982, was not cut from the same heroic cloth as Tommy Douglas, the CCF-NDP icon, who introduced public medicine to Canada. But as a civil servant for the Douglas government, then a minister of health, and finally premier, Blakeney believed that Saskatchewan had exerted an influence out of all proportion to its size and that this influence was directed toward \u201cmaking Canada the tolerant and relatively just society that it has become.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lougheed started with the premise that the free enterprise system would produce development and that this in turn would provide the necessary resources for social advancement. Blakeney began with a desire for social justice and was determined to show that a more caring society was also one that could thrive economically. The two men often ended up in the same place but they started from different ends of the political spectrum.<\/p>\n
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